


Tear Down the House I Grew Up In

by bluewoodensea



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-War, Jewish Character, M/M, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-10
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2020-01-10 22:27:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18417140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluewoodensea/pseuds/bluewoodensea
Summary: When the war was over it was still not over. There were the names of the missing. There was the burying of the dead. There were the reparations and there was the work of the Obliviators. There were the arrests of Voldemort’s supporters and agitators. There were the trials, the war crime tribunals.-Of trauma, survival, the aftermath of old violence, lives lived in a war-torn and divided society.(Archive Warnings: contains references to death and violence, but none that take place within the time period of this narrative.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> After every war  
> someone has to clean up.  
> Things won’t  
> straighten themselves up, after all.
> 
> \- Wisława Szymborska

**August 1998**

When the war was over it was still not over. There were the names of the missing. There was the burying of the dead. There were the reparations and there was the work of the Obliviators. There were the arrests of Voldemort’s supporters and agitators. There were the trials, the war crime tribunals.

Sirius thought, without self pity, that he was not someone who should have survived.

There were others: who died, who should have survived. The ones who knew how to live in the world and rebuild it, who taught and fought and helped others.

He was never one of them. He spent twelve years in a cramped cell, between the day the war was won and the day it was begun again. He had not experienced the interwar years of unsteady peace, the people made fearful and conservative.

He did not know how to build, and there were too many things he wanted to burn away.

It was a war that had left very few scars on the landscape. Nothing like Muggle wars: no scaffolding to hold up damaged buildings, no rubble. It had been fought in many quiet places and in the halls of the Ministry. The bodies had been buried, or were still being discovered.

Sometimes he thought how much easier, or simpler, it would have been not to have survived, to have died fighting and not to have to watch the world struggle to right itself. If he had died fighting, perhaps he would have been considered some kind of hero and the rest of his worthless life (he did not try to deceive himself) kindly overlooked.

He could not adjust to the idea of a future. He was not at all sure he had one.

***

He found an abandoned flat in London and stayed there — would stay there, he thought, until something better came up. There were many places like these in wizarding towns now: many people had left Britain during the First Wizarding War; it was hardly surprising it should have happened again.

There was damp on the walls; the sofa was torn and threadbare; and despite the summer warmth there was a cold in the room, a cold of disuse. He had to lift the door slightly to close it, muttered an incantation to mend it properly. With a slight effort he forced open the window and he did not move from it until nightfall.

He knew London and once he had loved London, the vastness and sprawlingness, the endless streets, the multitudes of people, the constant movement. Between the cobblestones the earlier rain caught the streetlights and shone like pieces of broken glass. In places messages had been carved into the walls: names of those who died on that spot, graffiti in support of or against Voldemort.

In London and elsewhere the houses of the Death Eaters stood empty, now that their owners had fled or been arrested. Thorfinn Rowle had hanged himself in his family home.

When he was a boy, Sirius had dreamt of his family home burning down around him.

Now when he slept, he slept through the first or second half of the night only, waking or falling asleep at around three in the morning.

At times he would sit for hours, watching the gold light falling through the windows every evening, the monotony of the August heat. After Azkaban he preferred the light to the darkness, the warmth to the cold. When he awoke in the middle of the night he would wait to watch the sun rise.

He felt raw, and chafed, like a wound that wouldn’t heal. He seldom even felt anger at all that had passed. He felt voiceless and solitary, detached from his surroundings.

He wrote to Harry from time to time. Harry often stayed at Grimmauld Place, for the only people who could find him there were people he trusted; but Sirius would have sooner gone back to sleeping in caves than ever set foot there again, and Harry understood, or thought he did. Sirius still hated his old room there, did not want to be forced to remember, at every hour, anything from before Azkaban. He did not always even want to remember his friends, overshadowed as they were by James’s death, Peter’s betrayal, Remus’s death.

Dumbledore was still revered as a hero, now more than ever. Sirius never talked to Harry about Dumbledore, now. Harry had his own demons; he did not need Sirius’s. Dumbledore won the war. Sirius knew that. He didn’t have the language to talk about what had happened.

***

Severus moved between the world of the Ministry and the world of the government.

He had taken up Ministry work without pause. The work of the wars was done. He had given evidence at the trials; there would be more to come; he could not go back to the work of spying and he would not go back to Hogwarts.

Instead of providing information now he removed it, still under instruction, this time from the Ministry.

In the past there had been wars that were limited to the wizarding world, but wars like these crossed the boundaries and threatened the International Statute of Secrecy. The Obliviators altered memories, but there were records that slipped between the cracks, that were over-revealing or contradictory. Some of the information needed to be erased, other records to be changed.

After discussion, it had been decided that the Statute should remain in place. To repeal it now would likely cause more problems than it solved. It was judged too dangerous to let Muggles know of wizards, as it had been in 1689. The wizarding world had come out of one war; it did not want another.

Before the war, many had felt there were already too many Muggles who knew about their world: some of them wizards, some of them the relatives or friends of wizards. There were arguments put forward that wizards should be placed in key government positions so the wizarding world might protect itself. The wars, the genocides, the tortures, the shortness of Muggle lives were held up as proof of the inferiority of their world.

It was an old argument, one that appeared in most generations. 

The Ministry had kept files on everyone since the seventies or earlier. It had been a precautionary measure, perhaps, intended to pre-empt attacks on Muggle-borns or on the Muggle relations of mixed families, but it had meant that when the Ministry fell in 1997 it had been very easy for Death Eaters to locate Muggle-born wizardry.

In memory the Death Eaters looked absurd, sounded absurd; jealous, weak, hungry for power they did not need; absurd in their masks and symbols. But dangerous, terrifyingly dangerous.

Dumbledore had taken advantage of that — the nightmares, the flashbacks, the fear — used it to make him believe that there was nowhere safe but Hogwarts.

If he ever taught again, it would not be there.

And so he undertook Ministry work: slow, secretive, judged necessary. It did not hold the same danger he had lived with before, but it demanded similar subtlety. And all the while the slow, loathed process, begun over a year ago, of withdrawing any affection and loyalty he had once felt towards Dumbledore.

He knew he was an object of curiosity to those who recognised him, and to some a figure of fear or hatred. He had killed Dumbledore, the people’s hero; he had worked for years as a double agent; he had given evidence at the Death Eater trials: both sides had reason to hate him. (If there was another war, he could not be anyone’s spy again.)

He was not liked and he was not welcomed but he was still useful, and he prided himself on being able to do what others could not. And Kingsley Shacklebolt, Acting Minister, thought he was worth trusting again. The rifts and upheavals had left many without employment; many places of business had closed. Other people used Time Turners, illegally obtained, to work multiple jobs.

He did not like crowds, and now they afforded less anonymity than before. He rented rooms around the country; he ate, slept and lived alone and avoided those who knew him. He did not enjoy taking any part in the Muggle world, either, although he was used to subterfuge: he had few, if any, pleasant memories of it. He found it bleak and ugly and cruel; the wizarding world was cruel too, but he knew the root of his dislike of the Muggle world lay in his childhood. He disliked remembering himself as a child, that time and that place, and disliked anything that caused him to remember. Still, there was a kind of relief in going among people who did not know him at all, who did not hate him or fear him or suspect him or, even, admire him; who would soon forget him.

***

Years ago, Dumbledore had pushed Severus to take a position at Hogwarts. Dumbledore said it would be hard for him to find work elsewhere, now that his trial was over; he said Severus would be safer at Hogwarts.

Severus had had no desire to teach, particularly not at Hogwarts where there were both professors and students who remembered him as a student, unpopular and solitary; and he had no qualifications to teach. But nor had he had much choice in the matter. Dumbledore made it quite clear Severus owed him his life and his freedom and now any stability in his life, and that elsewhere his position would be a fragile one. There would always yet be a cloud of suspicion over him, since the Karkaroff trial and since his own.

And so Severus took up the post of potions master. He lived and worked in the dungeons, in Dumbledore’s school, and for months he barely left them. He slept very little; to pass the time he read, and he gained a reputation, among the Slytherins, for walking the lower levels of the school at night.

He still cared more for Hogwarts than for any other place he had known, but he had long since resented it as well. He became more withdrawn, given to irritability and unpredictable anger. He practised Legilimency and Occlumency under Dumbledore’s guidance, mastered the charms that would keep his hands from shaking. The periods of feeling detached from his mind and body were useful, or so he might tell himself, for the purpose of studying Occlumency. He wanted to keep Dumbledore out of his mind.

He had tried to kill himself before Dumbledore had convinced him to defect. He would never admit to it but he thought Dumbledore knew it.

Dumbledore was good at making people love him. It was a gift that Tom Riddle too had had, once, but Lord Voldemort had preferred to rely on fear. Severus had not loved him, perhaps, but he had been easily led into the promise of revolution. Dumbledore chose to make people love him, trust him, feel indebted to him; he collected people of use — often outsiders to whom he showed the trust and affection they craved — assigned them parts to play, and discarded them if they were not useful. He showed trust in order to gain loyalty, and he was happy, sometimes, for his enemies to think him a fool for it.

Severus had trusted him, been prepared to die for him, loved him in his way, been grateful for his protection, hated him for forcing him to stay at Hogwarts, hated him for knowing everything and sharing little, hated him for lying, hated himself for his own weakness and anger at Dumbledore to whom he owed so much. His loyalty to Dumbledore had been riddled with resentment.

He had hated Dumbledore for always being right and he still did. Dumbledore had known how to win the war and any condemnation of him would be dismissed as a personal grudge, trivial and petty.

Severus could not even be sure that it was not.

He had lost nothing he was inclined to grieve for, nothing he wanted back. Perhaps this was what freedom looked like.

***

Sirius remembered the First War and the Second War as the same war, because there was very little in his mind to separate them. Azkaban was a black space, an empty space in his life, each day the same as the one before it and the one after it. In that space other people had rebuilt their lives. In that space he had only ever been waiting to continue his fight.

He remembered Azkaban in pieces, because there was nothing to distinguish between the days, nothing to distinguish between day or night. He remembered very little of his interrogation — the room, the sound of footsteps, particular images, somebody else’s blood on his clothes, a grey stain on the table between him and them — and of all the things he dreamt of at night that was one of the worst. They tortured him, he thought.

The Aurors were dangerous then. They used Imperiatus to bring in suspects and Cruciatus to punish, if they felt like it. There was very little evidence anyone might have brought against them and, if convicted, the victims had no voice. Sirius had no pity for Death Eaters, but he had to wonder how many others were innocent. The Unforgivable Curses were designed to leave no mark, no trace, no evidence. Both Death Eaters and Aurors had taken advantage of this.

But everything before Azkaban felt very far away, as if it had happened at the other end of a long tunnel. It was for the best, he thought; it was easier not to remember too clearly; but he knew he had been happy for a time, on the other side of those twelve years.

***

It was in London that Sirius saw Snape: briefly, from a distance.

He looked as if he was working, although Sirius could not guess on what; he had not seen Snape for three months. He wondered if the Ministry still had use for a spy — but Snape had been Dumbledore’s spy, never theirs. 

His black clothes looked old-fashioned by Muggle standards but not outlandish: unlikely to draw much attention outside of the wizarding town. It was odd to see him without the voluminous expanse of black robes; he made a narrower, sparer shape without them, a lean dark figure in his buttoned coat, his trousers.

He did not look happier but he looked _better_ , as if some malign thing had been taken away from him. The world had half collapsed around them and he looked the better for it.

He did not slow, and he did not see Sirius, and he kept walking until one of the brick walls opened up around him and swallowed him from sight.

Sirius had begun to follow him, but he halted. There was no good reason to follow Snape. Their history was still one of enmity and distrust, justified or not; Snape would always find some reason to despise him, and right now reasons would be all too easy to find. It was only, he thought, that he had known Snape for a very long time: longer, perhaps, than anyone else left in his life.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> But to abandon you, said the other, would be to leave a part of myself behind, and how can I do that when I do not know which part you are?
> 
> \- Louise Glück

**September 1998**

It was three weeks before he saw Snape again. It was late afternoon, turning to early evening, and he imagined Snape must be returning from wherever his days now took him. This time, he followed.

In the one or two times they had met, after the battle, their old hatred of each other had been forced to give way to a thinly veiled hostility and an uneasy, grudging respect. He couldn’t cast aspersions on Snape’s loyalty now, and Snape gave up insulting his courage.

Quietly, he felt the lack of their old enmity. He had come to rely on their hatred of each other; if Snape had ever stopped hating him, Sirius would have taken it as a personal insult. Even when he had felt at his most useless, the fact of Snape’s hatred meant that Snape still saw him, recognised him, had some degree of respect for him, and Sirius could take some perverse, unlikely comfort from that. He had always preferred to be disliked than to be ignored.

He followed Snape to the wall. He knew his clothes were shabby; he was still underweight; his hair was growing matted again. It would be easy for Snape to mock him or insult him, but he was bored enough that he did not care. 

Snape, half turning, stopped when he caught sight of him. His hand went to the pocket of his coat, no doubt to his wand. “What are you doing here?” he said, when Sirius did not speak first.

_Nothing_ would be the truth. Sirius tilted his head back, looking at the tall buildings, the direction of the flat. “Squatting, technically,” he said.

Silence was not what he expected from Snape, but the other only watched him narrowly. Waiting.

Instead of attempting to ask what he wanted to, he said: “Are you teaching next year?” 

Snape looked a little taken aback — for a moment, before he concealed it. “No,” he said briefly, almost hesitating, as if the ordinariness or civility of the question had surprised him. It seemed as if there were more he might have said, had the question been asked by someone else.

Was it a lull in the old hatred or had they only succeeded in disguising it?

Then: “Why are you talking to me?” Snape said abruptly.

“I didn’t really know what we were doing, in the Order,” he said, careful. “You did.”

“Not everything.” 

“More than anyone else.”

Snape made a sound that might have been a laugh. “A low bar.” But the contempt in his eyes seemed to dull; he stared at the ground between them, as if distracted by unwelcome thoughts. Perhaps the subject of the war was too raw, too recent to bring up; many people treated it that way. But Snape — Snape was always brutally unflinching, and Sirius had never been good at avoiding a subject. They would talk about the war or nothing.

“Only Dumbledore knew everything,” Snape said eventually, his attention returning to Sirius with a renewed intensity. It was a little unsettling but better than his sudden remoteness. “And if we couldn’t trust him, who could we trust?”

There was something bitter underneath the words, thin and sharp as a scalpel blade. The words were ones Sirius had heard many times since his escape, but never with the same hard cold resentment that he felt himself, that he did not know if he had a right to feel. It was a relief — however short, however temporary — and something else, a violent longing, the weight of all the stormwater of the last seventeen years.

Snape was moving away from him, about to leave, silent again, expressionless again. Sirius wanted him to keep talking. 

Snape knew the war better than anyone else left alive, every inside wall of it, the parts Sirius had shared in and the parts he had been shut away from. He wanted to hear everything that Snape could tell, for Snape to tell him what, of everything he had believed, was true and what was untrue. He wanted Snape’s bitterness and anger and everything he had kept locked inside himself for seventeen years, all the things he had not said because they could have cost them the war. He wanted Snape’s hatred to be the same as his own.

He could not say that, but he did not want Snape to leave yet.

“Wait,” he said.

***

He took Snape to the flat. For the entire short journey, they said nothing. The way Snape kept his eyes fixed on him, the way he followed close — Sirius thought nothing needed to be spoken, now. But when they reached the stairwell, Snape said: _What do you want?_ Quietly, like it was a risk, like he wanted it clear. Sirius swallowed and said: _You. Please._ And then: _It doesn’t have to —_ and stopped, because he didn’t know what to say, how to say he harboured no real expectations of either of them, or if he should say anything at all. And after that Snape said nothing. He only followed Sirius through the door and pushed him down onto the torn couch, without roughness, without gentleness.

The time between them passed in slow-moving fragments, almost distant, as if it were already a memory. The cracks in the ceiling. Snape’s shoulder against his mouth. The hard bones of Snape’s body pushing him down into the couch.

When they had first met, it was more by chance that he had hated Snape. There had been very little thought or reason in it. Chance, fate, accident: in the shape of the Sorting ritual, and in his hatred of Slytherin that stemmed from his hatred of his family. And he had hated Snape because he had wanted him, and because he could not allow anyone to know it. And he had hated Snape throughout the war. And he had hated Snape deeply through all those years in his cell, certain Snape was a Death Eater as Wormtail was, wondering if the two of them had even been friends.

And now they were fucking in an abandoned flat: paint peeling on the walls and mould under the windows, broad daylight. The air was heavy with the room’s disuse, the sunless summer day, and Sirius knew his hands were digging into Snape’s flesh, knew he was trembling.

Afterwards he could see the bruises of his fingers on Snape’s ribs. Snape ignored them, dressed fast. The Mark on his forearm was greyer, less distinct than Sirius remembered, from the glimpse he had once caught of it. There was a painful gnawing misery in the pit of his stomach. Snape glanced at him, and said nothing, and left him.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> your heart is the rock  
> you threw through each window  
> of what's deserted you, so you turn  
> to the burnt out building inside you: the scaffolding  
> overhead, the fallen beams
> 
> \- Olena Kalytiak Davis

**October 1998**

Sirius had lost friends in the first war and more in the second. He was one of the only ones left.

He had joined the Order when he was seventeen. Because he had followed his friends, or they followed one another; because it would have spited his family, if they had known; because the fight was one he could not ignore, whether out of pride or principle or the two combined. 

The first time he had been in the Order, it had seemed at times almost romantic. They had all been very loyal to one another; they had all thought one another very brave. _And they were, of course they were._ They had all known the danger, but it wasn’t supposed to end the way it did: Marlene dead, Gideon and Fabian dead, and Edgar and Benjy and Dorcas and James and Lily, all dead; Caradoc gone; Frank and Alice institutionalised; Sirius shut away on an island prison; and Peter —

The second time he had been in the Order, it was as much as he could do to sleep at night. There were nights at Number Twelve when he had to force himself to close the door of his old bedroom, and days when he had to force himself to open it. There were still scorch marks on the curtains from when, at thirteen, he had attempted to set light to the room. There were cigarette burns on the window sill. He tried to take down the old pictures, but he couldn’t remember the spell. There were too many memories from before Azkaban that had become fragmented or lost; he struggled to trust himself, and he did not like to remember much of his past. 

He had always been fighting in the narrow space between his friends and his anticipated death: life short and death imminent. He had, in the Second War, come to take that for granted: that there was little chance of his survival even if they won. And they had to win, but it would have been so very easy to lose.

***

He remained as he was: sleeping little, barely eating, not wanting to stay anywhere, not wanting to stay still, unable to fix anything. He would move on from the flat if he had to, squat somewhere else, but he liked the quiet, the high-up vantage, the light. He brewed coffee on the stove and sat on the narrow grey balcony and watched the city around him and below him. Even he was well aware the coffee was barely drinkable, but the bitter taste and the warmth of the mug in his hands helped to ground him. There was something reassuring, perhaps, about his new unimportance in the world. There was no reward for his capture anymore.

It would not suit him for long. He did not especially like long periods of solitude, certainly not after Azkaban, and he did not like to feel useless. But he did not know what else to do, now that the war was over, and, with some guilt, he knew his old acquaintances would have grated on him. Harry was, to his knowledge, with the Weasleys — with Molly, who would have undoubtedly grated on Sirius — and, though they wrote to each other, Sirius could no longer find anything to tell him, now that he was doing nothing of use to anyone.

There had always been a faint edge of awkwardness between them, because each wanted, a little, for the other to be James. Harry was all the family he had, and Sirius wondered if it was normal for loved ones to seem something like strangers. He had never loved his own family, and his friendships had been fractured by the war, and he had lost too many people, too long ago for him to remember quite what closeness should feel like.

He thought, suddenly, of what it might feel to have any kind of closeness with Snape.

He would have wanted it, back then, when they were at school together. Had wanted it, in secret, since their third year. If it were not for the spectre of his family, and the growing shadow of the war, and his own self disgust over the matter, perhaps he would have tried to earn that closeness. Instead he had buried the secret, taunted Snape more cruelly, culminating in the night he almost sent Snape to his death.

And Snape had become drawn into a circle of pure-blood zealots, and Sirius had joined the Order even before he left school. Living alone in his flat made it easier to pick up other young men, although he still kept it secret from his friends.

And then the deaths. And then Azkaban.

In Azkaban he had stopped caring about secrets he had carried with him. The place had stripped him down to his barest self. There was no one to talk to, lie to, hide from, impress. He could admit all to himself, fully and without struggle.

Everything else there had been painful: the silence, the darkness, the noise, the isolation, his own bitter unvoiced fury. But he had survived it. He had taken that brutal clarity with him and escaped. He had still hated Snape for his part in Voldemort’s cult, and he had hoped Snape had been imprisoned: perhaps in some other cell on the island. But he had been wrong, and that realisation had, at the time, felt like a new betrayal. That one sense of justice done, that he had believed in throughout those years, was itself an illusion.

Now the various truths of the matter were out — not all, perhaps; with Dumbledore dead, the whole truth would probably never be known. If Snape knew, he might never share them. And yet Sirius had wanted him to, when he had followed Snape.

He thought about Snape often — about what had happened between them, that last time they met. Perhaps Snape was just another in the line of people he had trusted — however briefly — when he should not have trusted. There had at least been no consequences on this occasion, which was an improvement on the mistakes of his past, unless it was to make him all the more conscious of how isolated he had become.

There had been no coldness about the act, and no tenderness. It had been his choice, but the continuing distance between them had not been what he wanted. It was difficult to describe to himself what he had wanted.

It was stupid of him, he knew, to put hope of comfort or relief in Severus Snape, who hated him, who had always hated him, who had no reason to forgive him or confide in him. He had been restless, reckless, touch-starved, drawn on by the glimpse of a common ground and an old, old desire. And he did not know why Snape had gone along with it: a kind of cruelty, maybe.

But he had not imagined Snape’s anger, he was sure. And it had not been directed at him but at someone or something else. If he tried to understand, identify it further, he could not. Snape had spent his life secretive and unforgiving, quick-tempered and distrustful.

The encounter with Snape, short and desperate as it had been, had brought back too much: of Hogwarts, of their enmity, of Dumbledore as headmaster and as Order leader, of Sirius’s return to the school in 1993 and his recapture. His life of entrapments and escapes.

He had told Dumbledore everything, because he desperately wanted Dumbledore to believe in his innocence, and in the vain hope Dumbledore might advocate for him. And he had been saved, and he knew now Dumbledore had been instrumental in it, but over the last months, perhaps the last couple of years, he had been haunted by the suspicion that Dumbledore had not saved him for his innocence but for his usefulness. He was the last of the House of Black, he was an unregistered Animagus, and he had very little left to lose: in all these things he must have seemed an asset.

***

Among the files and archives of the county courts, Severus worked, sifted relevant information from irrelevant. As far as was possible, he spoke to no one, neither his colleagues nor strangers.

He took down case file after case file. He read through every testimony, every claim and counter-claim. Any evidence of magic he erased.

His seventeen year old self would be angry at this act, it occurred to him. The thought was one of resignation, a knowledge that there was a chasm of difference between who he was before the Death Eaters and who he was now; he could not bring himself to feel anything else for that childhood anger. To dwell upon it might be to invite condescension towards it or, worse, sentimentality.

As a boy, he had hated, as many others did, the law that they live in secrecy; he had seen what it did to mixed families. It was a reason for his joining the Death Eaters: he did not want to have to hide or dissemble for any more of his life.

Ironic, he thought, since it was that same decision that led to him becoming a spy.

The faces he saw in the courts were not unlike those he saw in ministerial departments: tired civil servants, underpaid workers. He knew what would have become of them had the war been lost.

 _Wars are always lost_ , said something in him, the exhaustion of all the wartime years. But victory meant some deaths; defeat would have meant many deaths. Probably his own among them, although few would have mourned him and underneath it all he did not consider himself to be the least deserving of death.

Another file, another case; no suspicious traces of magic. He returned it to its place. Days in the courts moved slowly. He would spend the evening writing reports. Tomorrow would be much the same as today. But he could not face the thought, yet, of having no work to occupy his mind. This work would last a few months, and perhaps then he would be better able to consider his position.

It was exactly two weeks since he had slept with Black. It was not important, and yet it still felt one of the stupidest, most self destructive acts of his life.

He had been careful for a long time, tried to anticipate and premeditate everything. The stakes had been high enough to necessitate it, but perhaps it had also been out of a distrust of himself.

Sleeping with Black was very far from the worst decision of his life. But it haunted him in a way he could not justify. It could not be a coincidence Black had initiated it now, in the muted aftermath of the war, and he would not allow himself to be the coping mechanism for whatever grief or guilt or anger Black felt.

It had been a mistake to go with him at all, in all probability: to follow him, to let himself be led. It felt like weakness. It made him remember, too clearly, how deeply he had wanted it when they were young. Black had not known; no one had known; Severus had been naïve and reckless as a student but not enough so to give anyone another reason to ostracise him.

He was reminded, suddenly and unwelcomely, of a night four years ago. Standing in the Shack, unseen, watching Black, listening to him, still wanting him horribly after all those years.

If they had been alone, things might have gone differently. If Black had not insulted him, as so many times all those years ago, Severus might not have betrayed him.

Two weeks ago, he had once again followed Black and he had wanted him still; no point in denying it to himself. But he had never intended to let himself be used. Perhaps he would never have to see Black again.

***

In the evening he returned to the room he had rented since early July, not far from the Ministry. It was habit that made him check he was not followed, but a habit he had no intention of breaking yet. When he reached the house, satisfied, he let himself in and climbed the stairs to the second-floor room in which he stayed; the temporary relief of the liminal existence.

In his life, he had lived in two places: his childhood home in Cokeworth, and the dungeons of Hogwarts. Neither had been his — his parents’ house was now legally his but did not feel it — and this room was still less his own and he had no idea how long he would remain. But the room had the virtue of being associated with no memories. He could have returned, at least for now, to Hogwarts; he could have returned to Spinners’ End. But instead he had packed all his books and supplies from his office so that he would never have to return, and he could not yet stomach the inevitable visit to the house.

This room was utilitarian: sink, stove, narrow bed, desk, small rectangular mirror nailed above it, birdcage in the corner; pale walls, brown carpet, a window that looked out onto a brick wall and the alley below.

In the cage there was a carrion crow. Severus was unused to tending to an animal; for years he had been able to use the school’s owls for any necessary correspondence. Here in London, a crow would attract less attention, and each day he left the cage and window open so it might take care of itself.

He sat down at the desk to pen a short, coded missive to the Ministry on the day’s progress, and then rolled it up tightly and crossed the room to the cage.

“I need you to deliver this to the Ministry.”

As he affixed the small scroll to its leg, his thoughts returned involuntarily to Black, the flat, the meeting a fortnight ago. He stroked the feathers on the crow’s beak, absently. It nipped at him gently, which reminded him to stand back and let it leave. He leant against the window and watched it winging over the roofs, watched the scavenging pigeons on the pavement below, the magpie in the gutter of the house opposite.

“ _I could turn and live with animals_ ,” he murmured to himself, and was surprised by the lapse. He had not allowed himself the luxury of talking to himself in many years.

He returned to the desk, the day's reports, the partly completed forms. Under usual circumstances he found it easy enough to work on them. The noise, never loud, from the street rarely irritated him. Now, however, memories kept blind-siding him. Sounds, movements, distracted him. The pattern of the faded wallpaper distracted him.

Clearly his self-discipline was slipping, he thought. Some of the things on which it had been built were now gone. It was the absence of old structures, the absence of deceit. He had never had a natural talent for lying. If he had, he might not have needed Occlumency. He had never expected to stand on the other side of the war, to see it finished. To live freely was a matter of adaptability.

The wizarding world had laid emphasis on not changing — had done, probably, since at least the seventeenth century. Never changing, never assimilating into the world beyond. The inclusion of Muggle-borns threatened that. So, too, had the inclusion of half-bloods.

It had been centuries before the European schools consented to teach lower-born wizards, the labouring classes. Longer still before they accepted outsiders, those not born into their world.

Black and Potter were ideals of wizardry: clever, talented, pure-blood, popular. For this reason — at first, for this reason only — he had resented them both. Meanwhile, some collective instinct among the students had quickly singled him out as an outsider, which turned easily, on the part of some, to cruelty. 

When he arrived at Hogwarts he devoured everything, read everything, experimented with new spells and potions. The thought of any knowledge being forbidden chafed him, after the childhood years of waiting to learn magic; by his fourth year, he had gained access to the library’s Restricted Section. He wanted to learn everything and share nothing. He wished now he had shared nothing, that none of his amateur, vengeful spells had ever drawn interest from student Death Eaters. He had been an easy mark, easily seduced, and he had not understood the violence of their rhetoric for what it was. Not until he saw the murdered men and women.

As a child, he had learnt scraps of information about his mother’s world, things she had felt able to tell him. He knew something of the other pure-blood families; he knew of the House of Black, and, when he first saw Sirius, assumed he would be put into Slytherin. He had hoped, he thought, for a friendship. But Sirius had been Sorted to Gryffindor, and because of it received a Howler from his parents in the first week, and courted emnities with every Slytherin student, and for some reason — it seemed — with none more so than Severus.

Only once had there been any kind of acceptance between them: both of them wary and uncomfortable at one of Slughorn’s gatherings, for once not bothering to be openly antagonistic towards each other, almost united in their silent unease. Clever students, both promising; especially Black, with his family’s wealth behind him; but Snape was ambitious and hard-working, with a disregard for the conventions of magical practice.

The tensions in the school, in the wake of war, pushed the Slytherins ever closer, more clannish, and those who had been encouraged by their families to join the Death Eaters formed their own clique, persuaded others to join them.

Lucius Malfoy, a few years older, adopted him into his group, and that seemed better at the time than to be an outsider. Becoming a part of the not quite Death Eaters had happened slowly, unobtrusively.

Severus had had an idea of what revolution would look like: the Statute overturned, magical knowledge no longer taboo, no more confinement, the world broken open. The reality had not looked like that; in reality, it was no revolution at all.

***

He had learnt of Sirius Black’s arrest the way most people did: through the Daily Prophet. At first he felt scepticism, but that faded, for other people were always unknowable and events unpredictable; and then he felt anger at Black’s hypocrisy when they were students together, at his apparent hatred of the Dark Arts; and then a strange kind of jealousy, for it had been hard not to be drawn to Sirius Black and now he felt cheated of something. And at last the knowledge that he had betrayed Black along with Voldemort when he had defected, and perhaps he felt satisfied and perhaps he did not.

And then Black had betrayed him, along with the rest of the Order. So he had believed.

Dumbledore seemed to faintly dislike Severus reading the newspapers, but Severus continued to do so, in the privacy of his dungeon or — when the school was quiet — at the top of the Astronomy tower.

He had learnt of Sirius Black’s innocence twelve years later, a broken lifetime later.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> truth — don’t they say so? — is painful  
> and needs you to know your blood,  
> needs your wounds
> 
> \- Odysseus Elytis

**October 1998**

From the disowned son of pure-blood supremacists he had been before Azkaban to the fugitive fighter he had been after, Sirius did not know how to live as others did.

He had once thought of his time at Hogwarts as the best of his life. Gradually, any nostalgia had become outweighed by anger and grief.

He had known more freedom there than in his early childhood. His rebelliousness had been considered attractive by his peers. He had found the work easy; his family had always been wealthy; he was thought privileged, handsome, talented, fortunate; he had potential, his teachers said; he would be successful in some way or another. He thought now all his luck had run out early in life.

Sometimes, in Azkaban and bad nights since, he questioned whether his friends would have died if he had not been in their lives. If the Animagus transformation, on which he had worked so hard, were part of the chain of events that led to their deaths — and to his imprisonment, and to his escape. He had never known another such friendship as theirs. He had never known another such loss.

When they had succeeded in the Animagus transformation, he had felt that not only the new-gained power but the secrecy of it bound them together, made their friendship more, and he had believed this friendship would last their whole lives. He had been, he thought now, naïve and arrogant and reckless.

Perhaps Snape would have disliked him no matter how Sirius had behaved towards him. That did not change the past, nor absolve him of the uncomfortable feeling of an apology owed, most sharply for that moonlit night some twenty years ago, that would have left Snape dead or infected with lycanthropy.

Remus had never fully forgiven him for that night, at least not while they were young; perhaps, just perhaps, in the last few years, he had. It was Remus who would have taken the blame and carried the guilt, had Snape died or James or both of them. Sirius had never entirely stopped despising himself for it, but he had never admitted to it. It was only two years ago that he had apologised to Remus for it.

Throughout the seven years of study he always distrusted himself, could not shake the feeling that maybe Slytherin was where he belonged, that his friends liked him for someone he was not or would not like him if they saw him fully.

Inside the school there had been growing hostility against half-bloods and Muggle-borns from pure-blood students, and against Slytherins from the other Houses; and outside civil war grew and swallowed them all.

***

The next time he saw Snape, it was early in the morning, the streets still almost-quiet. 

That day he had awoken around two o’clock in the morning, lain unseeing and restless for perhaps an hour, and finally left the building to walk a while. The sun had come up; people had begun to appear. He had watched them. He saw Snape heading in the same direction as the first time he had watched him.

At the sight of Snape, he had the unwelcome sense he had been waiting for this, or fearing it. He could not say if that instinct was correct or not. Like a detail added into a painting or a figure returning to it, Snape’s appearance changed the shape of the preceding days, as if they had all been leading to this.

Talking to him seemed impossible now. But it was a conversation Sirius would always be half waiting for, always speculating different versions of, always hungry for the other side of it. And so, once again, he followed, hurrying to intercept him, ignoring his own reluctance.

As half expected, Snape ignored him — but he had been observed, certainly, and Sirius suspected that whatever happened next would depend on which streak of pride in Snape’s character won out. 

“Hey. Professor.”

He saw Snape’s face tighten, a little paler than usual. “I doubt that still applies,” he said, coldly and quietly.

“Well, a title’s a title.” He had Snape’s attention now, however briefly, and though Snape had not looked at him again. He leant against the stone wall. “I still want to talk to you.”

Snape looked at him then, with a violent intensity. Like hatred. “What about?” His voice was full of contempt and disbelief.

He shrugged, pretending it did not bother him. “Dumbledore. The war. That kind of thing.”

Snape scoffed, and started walking again. Sirius resisted the urge to roll his eyes.

“I don’t know where you’re going but I will follow you.”

Snape turned back, swift and venomous and exasperated. “I have work to do.”

“Wouldn’t stop me.” But he might regret it, Sirius conceded, silently. “Meet up with me later, then.”

Snape paused. He looked weary, Sirius realised, and felt a stab of curiosity, an increasingly familiar desire to understand — and regret, for it disturbed him to see signs of defeat in Snape’s manner. “Where?” Snape said. And then, acidly: “At your love nest?”

There was a sarcastic retort on his tongue, but suddenly his amusement flooded him. “Why not,” he said. “And I’ll try not jump you this time.”

Snape moved away from him, a small movement but sharp as if scalded. He left without a word, towards a bricked-up archway and through the wall. _Perfect_ , Sirius thought, _now he’s embarrassed because I laughed at him and he won’t come_. If they ever managed to have any kind of conversation, it would be a miraculous event.

***

Was Black now following him, Severus thought, the conversation still rankling, or had he learnt where to find him, or was this meeting simply a stroke of ill luck?

He had expected Sirius to be better, happier, by now — grieving, perhaps, but free to live as he wanted, to be with those he cared about. He had been surprised by Black’s appearance, his living quarters. The insomnia in his eyes, the edge of defeat and febricity in his manner, his clothes that looked as if he had slept in them. He had seemed worse in the past — the suppressed rage and despair of the two years spent holed up in Grimmauld Place — he did not look as though he were drinking. There was a clarity about him, raw, steady, almost ruthless but a ruthlessness that did not seem cruel. 

The careful part of him warned him to avoid Black. The part of him that was sick to the teeth of silent loyalty wanted to ignore the consequences.

Over the years he had kept away from almost everyone in almost every way possible. Other people had been variously an irritation, a danger, a complication; sharing any information about himself had been a risk not worth taking; friendship, intimacy, would have been a danger to both himself and them. He knew he was tired of secrecy.

With Black he could be brutally honest. The anger in him wanted to be honest, wanted to speak itself freely. He had not, because he still had a duty of discretion and though his true loyalties were now known he was still resented; there was no one to speak to. He had avoided the press. He had avoided the surviving members of the Order. To speak with Black felt dangerous, and yet he could not find any material danger in it. His cover was over, the war was over, he could never again work as a spy, and it seemed clear there was no one else with whom Black wanted to share these conversations.

Perhaps it was the danger that also attracted him, the edge of unknown risk, the desire for recklessness over subterfuge. The only one with whom he had shared any honesty, for many years, was Dumbledore. That was something from which he wanted to distance himself.

He had forgotten, more or less, the electrifying sense of feeling oneself recognised, understood. He had felt it, briefly and mistakenly, when he first left Cokeworth for Hogwarts. He had felt it, more briefly, more mistakenly and far more dangerously, among the nascent Death Eaters.

The risk that lay in meeting with Black was not material. The danger was to himself, of humiliation.

***

Sirius stole his breakfast, partly out of old fugitive habit and partly because he had not yet attempted to deal with the issue of regaining access to his Gringotts vault.

He thought he had most of the day, if not forever, until Snape might appear, so he did not go back to the flat. He walked in the green parks, read books in local libraries, until late in the afternoon he returned to the flat. Then to occupy himself, and to make his surroundings more bearable, he swept and cleaned the place, and washed and combed his ragged hair. 

At the back of his mind was the irritating possibility that he was doing all this because Snape might come here later, which forced the question of whether Snape’s good opinion was something he wanted, or, at least, if Snape’s contempt was something he wished to avoid. Either was probably an exercise in futility, he thought, annoyed at both Snape and himself.

He hated waiting, all the more so when he was not sure if there was anything to wait for. He had no real idea how much of the day would be taken up by Snape’s work. 

He could not leave, because he did not know when Snape would come (if he would at all). He sat on the balcony and read some of the mildewed books that had been left in the flat. He watched the people walking below. He toyed unseriously with equally bad ideas: attempting to climb the outside of the building, following Snape, telling Harry about the whole hopeless mess of it.

 _Come back_ , he thought, at intervals. _Talk to me. Come back._

***

When Snape arrived it was close to eight o’clock. He made no sound on the stair — perhaps he had Apparated to the door of the flat — and let himself in without knocking: a quiet, pointed reminder, no doubt, that the flat was not Sirius’s. Sirius thought he had probably been in two minds whether to come at all, and wondered how much on his guard he should be.

***

Against his better judgment, Severus thought; against his better judgment he was here, and knowing that he had chosen it anyway. Perhaps this was the last time; a final meeting to satisfy himself that he knew what Black wanted from him, to give himself one chance to speak of the war freely. Then it would be over.

Black was leant out of the window, watching the street below. He was not yet pardoned, for there were still posthumous charges to be brought against Peter Pettigrew, but he was almost forgotten; he could walk without being recognised.

He remembered Black’s caged restlessness from before, in the two years he had spent shut up in Grimmauld Place. He remembered him as a student, and the jagged, volatile, angry thing in Black that he had sensed, that Black showed to no one. It had drawn him in; he had wanted to know the truth. He had always wanted to know the truth of everything.

He had always seen Black’s face in Bellatrix Lestrange’s. For some reason, it had amused him that she had hated him too.

***

It had been wrong to invite him back, Sirius thought. The last time hung unspoken, unmistakeable in the air between them. The unspeakable loneliness and uncertain shame he had felt afterwards. He turned to face Snape fully, the windowpane at his back.

Of course Snape would make him speak first. Every fight between them, every insult, seemed to come back to Sirius in an instant. 

He resolved himself to go through with it. 

He said: “Can we talk?”

Snape glanced about the room. “We’ve never _talked_ ,” he murmured.

“Not constructively,” Sirius agreed, and Snape looked directly at him for perhaps the first time since entering the room. 

“You wanted to know about Dumbledore,” he said, abruptly. “I suppose it doesn’t make any difference now. So ask.”

To the heart of the matter. He should have felt relieved. 

“Was he…” But now that it came to it, he realised he felt ashamed, almost unwilling, to ask. “Was he using me?”

He sensed the question was not one Snape had been expecting. “Yes,” Snape said, eventually, “I should think so. That was his usual approach. He thought it was justified.”

If the question had felt like some sacrifice of his pride, the answer felt like a defeat. But he he had spent enough time with his own thoughts, his own solitary debates. “Do you think so?”

That question seemed to take Snape more off guard than the last. His face was hard but again, as earlier that day, it was disconcerting to see Snape seem defeated too. “We won,” he said. “So I suppose it was.”

“Did he use you?”

Snape laughed, humourlessly. “More than most.”

“Harry?”

Snape looked at him then, with a kind of uncertain sympathy. “More than anyone,” he said quietly.

There was a silence. Sirius suspected a part of Snape’s animosity towards Harry had been enacted for the sake of Voldemort’s supporters, but their mutual dislike probably still remained. He would not ask now.

Snape said: “Does he know?”

“Yes. No. I think so but —” Sirius ran a hand through his hair, feeling it catch in his fingers. “He doesn’t _mind_.”

“How enlightened,” Snape said dryly.

Sirius thought of Harry, and the Dursley family, and Dumbledore, and all the parts of Harry’s life he had not seen and all the battles of which he had not been a part. The weight of all of it. Sometimes, he knew, the only survival was acceptance, though it was not one he had ever used. “Maybe,” he said, his voice quiet even to himself.

Snape waited, not particularly patiently, saying nothing. It was no time to pick apart exactly how much of his dislike of Harry was genuine and how much of it had been cover, and Sirius was too protective of Harry to make it an easy subject. He felt Snape would leave soon if he did not speak further, and on a different topic.

“Did Dumbledore think I killed those people?” 

Severus hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said. “He may have pushed for a trial. He may not. I wasn’t even sure if you had gone to trial.” In reply to Sirius’s questioning look, he continued: “I followed the _Prophet_ ’s coverage but it is not, as you are aware, altogether reliable. Voldemort’s defeat was their main story. And, after all, the people you were supposed to have murdered were only Muggles.”

He had wanted a trial. He had wanted, at any personal cost, for them to give him Veritaserum. Then he might have told them about Pettigrew; then he might have prevented a second war. Not that he had known that, seventeen years ago. 

“Did you believe it?” Among those who had known him then, he would not have blamed Snape for believing it. As far as he knew, everyone had believed it.

“I… Not at first.” He looked more ill at ease than Sirius had ever seen him. “But I thought I must be wrong. I became used to the idea. I thought it was ironic, shall we say, that you betrayed the Order after I betrayed the Death Eaters. I thought I should have known we would always be on opposite sides.”

He felt utterly uncertain, taken aback by the words. “You… thought of me?” He had always felt as if when he entered Azkaban he had ceased existing for anyone else.

“More times than I wanted to,” Snape said, darkly.

Sirius stared down at his hands, still gripping the edge of the window sill. “I thought of you. I didn’t know you’d defected. I hated you. I hoped you were in Azkaban too.” _And I still wanted you_ , he thought. He had hated himself for that.

Snape took that without sign of anger, still less surprise. When Sirius did not speak, he said: “When did you stop hating me?”

“Did I?” It was a poor attempt at flippancy; the question had caught him offguard. He had never thought about it.

“Or is that question off-limits?”

Sirius thought: _I stopped hating you when I ran out of reasons. I stopped hating you when you were the only one who saw me. I stopped hating you because I shouldn’t have hated you to begin with. I don’t know if I did hate you and if I didn’t I don’t know if there is even a word for what I felt. And I don’t think I’ll ever stop wanting you, even if it’s a bad idea._

“I don’t know.” He hoped Snape would let the subject lie. And though Snape looked both unconvinced and faintly scornful, he allowed it without comment.

***

Severus had expected more show of hostility from him. A tension between Black’s dislike of him and his need for information: ambivalence, resentment. But the shadow-play of Sirius’s thoughts, when they surfaced, intermittently, into his, contained uncertainty, solitude; flickering images of days spent in this flat, of Number Twelve, of his dead friends, the remnants of the Order, of battles and skirmishes, the terrible darkness of Azkaban; of Severus himself as a student, seen always as if from a distance; of grief and blazing anger; of the last meetings between the two of them — of desire.

All of it unsettled him far more than he wanted to admit. And yet there was nowhere else he wanted to be. They almost understood each other, he and Black. They knew how rare and obscure truth was. They would rather know the worst.

He had not expected Black to realise enough to ask the questions he asked. He had not really expected Black to treat it so unflinchingly. Although he would not say it aloud, he recognised the courage and honesty in it — in Black, more so than he ever had before.

“I never trained,” he said, surprising himself slightly.

Sirius looked up. “What?”

“As a professor. As a teacher.” There had not been time for that. “At first I based the curriculum on whatever I wanted to research, but I found teaching an area made me lose interest in it. So then I structured the curriculum around subjects in which I wasn’t particularly interested.”

Sirius gave a half laugh. “Did you _like_ any of them?” 

“The students?” He gave it due consideration. “I… preferred… the ones who were quiet and learnt quickly.”

“Like you,” Sirius said wryly.

Severus didn’t answer. Sirius’s ability to be insightful could always discomfit him slightly, although it was not a particularly probing insight.

But Black was watching him thoughtfully, following the subject through to its implications.

"Was it Dumbledore's idea?"

"Rather more instruction than suggestion." The bluntness, too, was not entirely usual for him, but Black knew more than others and Black had known him almost all his life. And dissembling had never come easily to him. “After... after the Death Eaters —” He stopped. He rarely spoke of that time. What he felt did not want to be spoken: the shame of what he had done, of how easily he had been manipulated, of having to live according to Dumbledore’s word, of knowing he should have been imprisoned with the rest. 

“Why did you join them?” Black said, before Severus could continue.

There was a generation of history in the answer, and it rose up as if to silence him again. 

“They said that wizards had lived in fear for too long,” Severus said, “and I thought I understood.”

They had called it separatism, and it promised freedom. If the Statute were lifted, people like himself, his mother, would not have had to split themselves in two. 

“I defected when I saw people killed,” he said quietly, “and I went to Dumbledore because I thought I would be killed too.”

That was it: the story of his credulity, his stupidity, his cowardice. It was very simple. If it had been less simple, it would, perhaps, have been less humiliating.

It stung him still, in his pride or his sense of failure.

“I thought, at first, he had saved me,” he said, “but then I realised he had sent me back, in more danger than before. But by then I couldn’t see any other way. And, of course, I only had myself to blame.”

Dumbledore had promised to help him, to advise, to make provision. A spymaster was better than nothing.

He had spent most of his life angry, bitter, resentful of those who had power over him. But they were gone now. What had been his anger had become a shapeless, directionless emotion he could not explain.

Perhaps one day historians would debate these same arguments, of the righteousness and callousness of Dumbledore’s actions. But no one else would discuss them now, not publicly. For now, it could not and would not be said. And Sirius knew it as he did. To see that same conflict reflected in Sirius quieted something in him.

Talking cure, the Muggles called it. _Bertha Pappenheim_. It did not come naturally to him. He returned, at intervals, to the thought of ending the conversation; but it ran on. Sirius made it easy, too easy. That was unexpected.

***

Truthfully Sirius said, “I didn’t expect you to come back.”

After the last time, he had felt Snape wanted to avoid him. It had begun to feel like something that had not happened, could not have happened; a blurred memory, an unreality. Were either of them capable of kindness, he thought, and the thought surprised him with its unexpectedness. Held here, the world muffled, maybe he could speak of it. Their conversations were probably on borrowed time.

He almost asked, _Why did you want it?_ but he stopped himself. It seemed too much like vulnerability. He was not sure he wanted the answer.

Instead: “Why did you leave?” 

Snape did not answer for a long moment. Then he said: “I thought perhaps you regretted it.”

Sirius shook his head. “Only… only when I thought you still hated me,” he said, “or were using me, maybe.”

Snape looked startled. “I wasn’t,” he said, very quietly, haltingly.

Sirius was silent, and so was Snape.

“I thought,” Snape said, stiffly, “you might have been using me.”

Sirius felt the startled guilt in his throat like bile. “I wasn’t,” he said, much as Snape had. “I wouldn’t. I should… I know I owe you an apology, for a lot of things probably, but I wouldn’t, ever.”

There was a stillness sometimes about Snape that could seem unnerving, as if he were drawing tightly inside himself, guarded, barbed.

“I owe you an apology,” Snape said, “for certain things.” 

Sirius’s lips twitched. Neither of them had offered further explanation; to do so felt as if it might be patronising. He knew what Severus meant; Severus knew what he meant. It was a truce. They would not press it.

“I’m glad you didn’t die.”

Snape nodded: a tiny, almost imperceptible gesture that seemed to indicate acceptance, agreement, the sentiment returned. A little ironical. He straightened up. He was leaving.

“You don’t have to go.”

“I do,” Snape said, “for the time being.”

Perhaps he did, Sirius thought. Perhaps he didn’t. Snape had done him a courtesy by coming here. He could return it by not questioning him now.

***

Severus walked back to his room alone, through the half lit London streets. He had come to find a quiet he valued in these interim moments, between departure and arrival, and he wanted it now. He did not need to walk the journey but he preferred it. It was a time to think, a time to replay the conversation they had had. Now that it was over, for some reason he now felt more jarred by it. Before the battle, they had never spoken to each other with respect. Sometimes because they had failed to recognise each other, sometimes because they had refused to.

Though he suspected he would find himself visiting Sirius again, Severus had no intention of going back too soon. He had followed him twice now; he would wait before doing so again. 

He knew when something was wrong; an instinct picked up in childhood. He knew when there was something off-kilter in Sirius. It took more of an effort not to assume it was caused by his presence — as he had that first time, in that bleak London flat. Perhaps, he thought grudgingly, he should not have left quite so abruptly.

It had been more years than he cared to remember since he last slept with a man. Even when it had been safer to do so, before he turned spy, there had not been many.

Whatever dangers there might yet be now, they had courted and lived through worse. Solitude as defence no longer applied. He wanted to shed the danger as obsolete. And though he did not want to admit it —

He would go back, he knew that much.

He did not want to be needed; he wanted to be wanted, wholly. He had been needed before by others — by the Order, by Dumbledore — and he did not want Sirius to be among them. He did not want to be Sirius’s confessor or Sirius’s escapism. He wanted to be recognised and wanted. By Sirius, and no one else.

***

It was with a renewed mental clarity Sirius spent his largely sleepless night, thinking on everything he had learnt. He felt he was following Snape into some private place, along some private road. It was only a little illumination, but it was a distant fire. He felt less preoccupied by his own concerns, and more compelled by the thought of what similar experiences others might have had.

He believed — or wanted to believe — Snape would return. He thought Snape would have made it clear if he had no intention of doing so.

At dawn, his waking thought was that Snape had not used him, nor he Snape; they had not hated each other in that moment. Whatever they had not said, they had chosen it and wanted it. If only once. All he knew was Snape did not hate him enough to stay away from him. If he was honest with himself, he would have understood if Snape stayed away from him for the rest of their lives.

They had been forced together before, in Grimmauld Place, and fought or ignored each other at every turn. Could they have done otherwise; should he have tried to trust Snape then; had there been any chance of honesty?

It would be nice, he thought, not to have to _think_. To temporarily cease existing. There was no one, no cause, that needed him. His recent relationships had been built upon the Order, and the Order was disbanding, its surviving members going back to their lives. Their good and normal lives, their happily ever afters, while he, directionless and rudderless, a loose end in their story.

He was becoming maudlin, he thought disgustedly, and made himself walk around London, Southwark to Southgate, back again, until he was too exhausted to think about anything.

***

Snape returned, eight days later. It was evening; not long until twilight. Sirius had not followed him this time, had not known whether he should pursue the matter, but he thought he was glad of it. He had cleaned and swept again that morning, thinking he should leave the place soon, find somewhere else and hope the previous owner was alive to return.

Snape said nothing of why he had come back. Sirius was certain he would have deliberated if, and when, to visit.

He took the small chair in the corner of the room and watched Snape put his bag down quietly in a corner. They both seemed out of place here. It was easy to forget, in part, that he did not belong here and did not like staying here.

“I should probably leave here soon.”

“You should.” Snape straightened up, met his eye. “Where will you go?”

“I don’t know.” He needed whatever money he had left, to which he did not yet have access. There would probably be paperwork. He had no idea what he should do. “I’ll work it out.”

“There are people in the Ministry you can speak to,” Snape said, something stilted in his manner, as though he was not used to giving advice. “If you can stand to. Shacklebolt is trying to make sure people have the resources they need.”

He had not seen Kingsley since the battle. He had wanted to, but at this point in time Kingsley must be the busiest person in the country and Sirius’s own problems were hardly important.

“I’ll keep it in mind. Maybe when things are more normal.”

“Assume they won’t be.”

Sirius nodded, feeling he was probably correct but uncertain as to whether he wanted to act on it. “Are you spying for them now?”

“No.”

“Would you tell me if you were?”

“Yes, unfortunately it seems I would.” He paused. “I am helping to ensure all records of the war align with the Statute. There are a few other people on the project and it’s expected to last a few more months.”

He tried to think of some reply. “That sounds…”

“Tedious and bureaucratic,” Snape supplied.

“Well, my life is just tedious at the moment.”

Snape regarded him with something like curiosity. “That seems unlike you,” he observed at last.

He laughed slightly. “Azkaban was mostly boring too.”

“I suppose so.”

His tone caught Sirius’s attention. “Have you been there?”

For a few moments he thought perhaps the question was one he shouldn’t have asked, or that Snape would not answer. When he did he was quiet. “It took… five weeks to organise a trial date. In the interim I was there.” 

“You didn’t say before.”

Snape shrugged. “I’d said enough for one conversation. And I didn’t think it would help.”

“That doesn’t matter.” He wanted to offer something: comfort, perhaps, or forgiveness; whatever it was, it felt like something he could not offer. “I’m… sorry.”

“You were there for twelve years without a trial. I knew I would have a trial, and I knew Dumbledore wanted me acquitted.”

He spoke as if it was not important, as if the subject held no interest for him, and if Sirius had not been imprisoned there himself he might have believed it. He had known Snape since childhood, and he knew Snape was not a forgiving nor a forgetful man in any matter. The muscles in Snape’s face were tight; his eyes were cold. 

“Were you angry at him?” Sirius asked, carefully.

Snape made a sound of disgust. “Of course not.”

He was looking at the floor in front of Sirius, at nothing. He did not speak. Slowly he moved to stand against the window ledge and settled there, still silent, still not meeting Sirius’s eyes. It was shame, he realised: shame, humiliation, anger, regret. He knew something of how the trials went.

“I hated,” Snape said, wooden and quiet, “that I was dependent on him.”

“A lot of us were, to some extent, I think.”

Snape seemed to allow that. He leant back against the window frame, the tension in him subdued.

“The vast majority of witches and wizards in this country studied under Dumbledore at some point,” he said, reflectively, as if without bitterness; “he made everyone feel as they did when they were children.”

Sirius had never considered it but he understood what Snape meant by it: Dumbledore always paternal, always trustworthy, always a mentor, a figure of safety and stability in decades of cold war and battles.

“Did you hate him?” he asked.

“He was the only person in the world I trusted,” Snape said, “until I realised I was a means to ending the war. It was — childish of me, I suppose, to resent him for that.”

“Sounds normal,” Sirius said. “Not that I’m a good judge of normal. Or anything else.”

Snape looked at him, with an odd combination of resignation and amusement.

“Dumbledore was the closest to a friend I ever had,” he said wryly. “I’m afraid I couldn’t recognise a healthy relationship if I tried.”

It was difficult to respond to that. “Are you trying to scare me off?” he said, with an effort at lightness.

“Hm. That hasn’t worked yet.” 

Sirius almost said, _I will, if you want_ , and then realised it was a promise he did not want to make. Eventually, if Snape wanted him to stay away, he would, but not yet.

“We didn’t know you’d left the Death Eaters,” he said. “I get why we didn’t, but I wish I’d known.”

Severus shifted his weight against the window. The sky was growing dark behind him. “Would you have believed it?”

“No idea.”

The silence seeped into the cracks between them, filling the space.

“The last twenty years of my life were determined by my joining the Death Eaters,” Snape said. “Maybe a spy was necessary. But I wish I had never joined them.”

“I don’t know if we would have won without you.” He was acutely aware of how much more important than his own Snape’s work had been.

“A good time to be another dead hero,” Snape said caustically. 

It had the air of a private joke, almost, and he might have said nothing further if Sirius had not been looking at him so intently. Snape looked away, as if contemplating whether, and how, to explain.

“Everyone is mythologised in death to a greater or lesser extent,” he said, after a few moments. “I would be thought better of, eventually, if I were dead. The living are — more difficult to accept.”

Sirius, leant forward in his chair, his head raised to stare at him, was perfectly quiet and still.

“Of course,” Snape said, his eyes steadily on Sirius’s, “it was easier to be angry at Dumbledore when he was alive; before he sacrificed himself for all of us. Not that his portrait ever stopped dispensing advice.”

Sirius’s laughter caught him by surprise. 

Severus never stopped watching him. Sirius did not want him to.

He had rarely if ever had the experience of wishing time to move more slowly; more often, he had wanted time to move faster, leap forward. But if tonight could last forever, he thought he would have been able to live with that. The unsatiated ache in his chest was strange to him. He knew only he did not want Severus to leave. 

Snape was looking drawn and tired, he realised. The conversation would have to stop. It was growing late in the evening, the sky entirely dark now. 

“Please stay,” he said. “You can take the bed, or the sofa, if you want. I usually sleep on the floor anyway.”

Snape looked surprised. “You do?” Sirius shrugged.

“Usually transform, stops me dreaming so much.”

Snape nodded, a little awkward. “Useful,” he murmured. “I… suppose I may as well. Stay, that is.”

He took the sofa, in the end, first throwing a blanket over it before lying down, stiffly. He had not pointed out he could as easily Apparate to some better lodging-place. Sirius tried to steady his mind, tried to convince himself he would sleep quickly. He sat on the floor by the balcony door. 

Normally he would be able to sleep for a few hours, but he was too conscious of Snape’s presence, too mindful of all he had said. Snape, from what he could see in the darkness, was staring at the ceiling.

He might have transformed — he would be more comfortable and sleep easier if he did — but he did not want to put any more distance between them than already existed. In Azkaban and after it had become a habit of subterfuge, and in the last months he had largely avoided it. To put any further distance between them now might risk the fragile acceptance they had finally, barely achieved. 

He wanted to be able to protect Severus in some way, to keep him from harm. Maybe that was only vanity; he did not know how, and Severus had survived the greatest dangers alone. And perhaps Snape still saw him as a threat: Sirius’s casual cruelty of their school years — or it must have seemed casual to others, though he knew himself better. Snape, he was certain, was too proud to allude to it, and Sirius had felt it more tactful to follow his lead. Yet Snape had every right to still loathe or distrust him, and if Snape wanted him gone he would abide by that. He could accept that what Severus wanted was an entirely separate matter from his own desires, that Severus’s peace of mind might depend on the complete abandonment of his past and all who fell within it.

He waited for Snape to fall asleep and distracted himself by watching the city. The wizarding part of the city could not be seen from the Muggle part of the city but the Muggle part could be seen from the wizarding part and he could see it now, miles of it, brick and metal and mortar and electric light, street lamps and neon and slow traffic. It was the quietest part of the night, but London was never dark.

Wizard communities were cities within cities, towns within towns, villages within villages. Because the House of Black was his family and because the city of London was his home, he had taken these communities for granted. It was only as a fugitive he had spent any time among Muggles. Before then, it had been a world on the periphery. He still did not really know what it was to live in it. It meant more to Snape than to him. 

He could hear the north in Snape’s voice sometimes, the accent he had worked hard and swiftly to lose when they were young: Lancashire, perhaps, or Cumbria. 

He had gathered very little of Snape’s background, though it had always been clear that it was far removed from his own. Had he thought himself better on that account? He could not remember; he hoped not. 

The distance between where he sat and where Severus lay felt over-sharp, the quietness over-loud. He wanted — he leant his head back against the uncomfortable wall and stared barely seeing at the shaft of lamplight outside — he wanted to lie beside him. The wanting was jarring and electric. 

There were places in the cities for men and women like them, all unplottable. Many pure-bloods, with their bloodline obsession, hated them and called them deviants. Many others preferred to feign ignorance. Muggle-borns were more knowing but as cruel. Wizarding law had never persecuted people like them, like himself and Snape, but nor did it acknowledge them; in wizarding law they did not exist.

He thought maybe that was why Alphard Black — lifelong bachelor, half shunned by his family — had liked him: they had recognised themselves in each other. Sirius had taken care, at Hogwarts, not to be recognised by anyone else.

He thought now Snape had probably done the same.

With Snape he was moving in some half-lit territory. He was feeling his way, carefully, afraid of missteps or misinterpretations, of reopening half-healed wounds. He had known Snape a long time, but he did not really know what Snape had been through, even less than Snape understood what he had been through.

 _Should I ask him?_ he thought, watching Snape’s unmoving shape. And: _Should I tell him?_ If he knew they had time he would let everything move at its own pace, but perhaps this was just some strange interim time between the war and the rest of their lives, that would end soon. But there was something, in this time, now, between them, that he wanted to remain. He wanted to earn any measure of trust he could.

***

He slept for what felt like moments, still sat leaning against the wall. He awoke, his limbs slightly sore, to see Snape silently walking the room. He closed his eyes again, opened them, waited for them to adjust. He could feel the irritation emanating from Snape: frustration, boredom, tiredness.

Sirius rubbed at his stiff neck, regretting every decision that had led to it. He wondered where Snape usually stayed. Maybe if he had not stayed here he would not now be sleepless and pacing. But he had chosen to stay here, and Sirius had chosen to sleep on the floor in human shape in the slim hope it would make things less awkward.

It was not enough for him to think Severus wanted him. He wanted to believe — to know — Severus liked him, and trusted him. That, he conceded, would probably take some time. Snape had said Dumbledore was the only one he had trusted, and that trust had been lost.

He tried to speak but his voice had gone from disuse. He cleared his throat; Snape glanced at him. “Can we keep doing this?” He would ask now, know now; Severus should leave if he wanted to leave.

“What, insomnia? Very probably.”

“No, I mean… seeing each other.”

Snape halted. A sharp, level look. “If you want to,” he said, guardedly.

Sirius nodded, suddenly too awkward to answer. 

At this point, he was not as afraid to trust Snape as he might have been, as he had been. Snape could be vindictive but he had never been manipulative; he was secretive but he was not a liar. Still, he might leave again, with or without warning, and then Sirius might never know why, whether it would be his fault or not. There was only so long, he supposed, he could hope to intercept Snape in corners of London.

Snape’s repeated path had taken him now to the far side of the room, almost entirely in shadow. When he turned back and the light from the street caught him he looked haggard, sudden bone-white in the harsh glare.

“Hey,” Sirius said, softly, “come here.”

Snape looked for a moment as if he would ignore him. But slowly he came over to where Sirius was sat leaning against the wall, and slowly he sat down beside him.

It was almost alien, almost inexplicable, this sense of concern he felt for Severus. This man who had fought long and secretly, whom he had hated and who had hated him, this man on the floor next to him.

Maybe, he thought, the fight breaks you either way. Maybe they all lost.

“I wish I’d done as much as you did,” he said.

James and Lily. Caradoc. Marlene. Remus. He should have remained Secret Keeper. He should have killed Peter. The time he had lost had been worth nothing to anyone.

“You shouldn’t blame yourself,” Snape said at last. “You made mistakes and you were lied to and you lost time, but you did better than I ever did. Ethically, I should have joined the Order when you did; from a practical point of view, I don’t know how any of us could have made the war shorter. I can’t blame Dumbledore for anything because I have no moral high ground.”

Sirius shrugged. “You can,” he said, and smiled at him briefly. Snape made a sound that might almost have been a laugh. 

“I try.” He tipped his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. It was unfamiliar to see him thus — almost in repose, more vulnerable — and Sirius took the opportunity to study him. With his eyes closed, his face looked a little like a sculpture, something carved from stone. Sirius found himself staring at the folds in his eyelids, the faint tracing of lines around his eyes, his long mouth.

Severus was not altogether handsome, Sirius knew — thin and dark and angular, the faint, fine-drawn traces of psychosomatic illness in his face, his slightly crooked teeth. 

Perhaps he was not handsome, but Sirius had always found him so: the high cheekbones, eyes dark and hollow like those of an oil painting, his long hair black as tar.

If they had been friends from the beginning, he thought to himself, perhaps everything would have been better. Perhaps they could have been open with each other; perhaps Severus would have come to live with him in his flat; perhaps he would not have been manipulated into joining the Death Eaters or into remaining at Hogwarts all his life; perhaps they would have been in the Order together from the beginning; perhaps they would have found a way to win the war for good, without so many dying; perhaps Sirius would not have been imprisoned; perhaps he and Severus would have lived their lives together and been happy.

It was a painful, idealistic fantasy. He closed his eyes, breathed in, focused on the sensation of the wall pressing against his shoulders.

Then Snape’s hand was on his hand, Snape’s fingers rubbing along the backs of his fingers, between the first and second knuckles: a strangely soothing gesture. Sirius felt a sudden longing to fall asleep beside him — for a long time, it would have been unthinkable even to let his guard down in the same room as Severus Snape. Sirius leant into his shoulder, and Severus shifted a little to make them both more comfortable. 

It was late, late. He was tired. He felt something he could not name, that he could not remember last feeling. He wanted to stay beside Snape until morning. He thought again how strange it felt to be here. He had never tried to plan his future because he had never expected to survive.

“I always thought I’d die before it was out,” he confessed.

“I thought we would all die,” Snape said.

Sirius looked at him then, pushing himself to sit upright against the wall once more. Severus looked back at him, his attention caught by the movement, and Sirius kissed him: suddenly, impulsively, for the first time. For a moment the angle was wrong but then Severus moved slightly and the sensation was flooding his mind — the strangeness of being with Severus, the unfamiliar taste of his mouth, but Sirius would have let it last forever if he could. And so it was Severus who broke the kiss at last, Sirius’s hand still curled into his shirt.

“There’s a bed,” Sirius said. “It’s not much, but it’s better than the couch.”

“Someone else’s bed,” Snape pointed out.

Sirius conceded that. Nevertheless: “My favourite bed to date.” Better than his childhood bed, better than no bed, better than a jail cell, better than ever setting foot in their old school again.

Severus let his fingers trace from Sirius’s temple to the angle of his jaw. “Fine,” he said, quietly.

Sirius pushed himself to his feet, set his hand against the wall and reached down to Severus, who, of course, refused it and stood up unaided. Sirius was nervous, he realised, perhaps because the last time had not happened the way it should have happened, or should not have happened at all in that moment — he did not want to drive Severus away again.

“I haven’t… done this since before Azkaban,” he said, with a sudden inexplicable honesty that he did not understand, did not even really want. “I mean, I hadn’t — last time we did this —”

“If it comes to that,” Severus said, “I hadn’t done this since before you went to Azkaban either.”

He did not fully comprehend the words for a moment. Severus had been free all those twelve years, free enough to be with whom he wanted, even if secretly. “Why not?” he said. “I mean, you could have…”

“When?” said Snape. “When I was with the Death Eaters, with their pure-blood mania for begetting heirs? When I was a spy? I never knew which would be worse: sleeping with someone who knew I had been a Death Eater or with someone who didn’t. There were always reasons not to.”

Sirius reached out, feeling the shape of Severus’s body under his clothes, the sharpness of the last remaining distance between them. “Tell me there aren’t reasons now.”

“Several, probably.” Snape’s hand pressed just under his throat, against the manubrium bone, keeping him in place. “Are you sure?” he said.

“Yes,” he said, certain and unhesitating. “Are you?”

Severus’s eyes were hard and unreadable. “Yes,” he said, and tightened his fingers around Sirius’s shoulder and kissed him again. And what Sirius felt was relief, more relief than it seemed he had ever known. 

He guided Severus towards the bed in the next room, gentle, trying not to stumble against him. There was no light inside the room, only outside; he could have made light but he did not care. He was kissing Severus in a way that almost hurt, kissing him as if he were starving. The metal bedframe hit his legs and he pulled Severus down beside him. This was what he wanted to last; this warmth, defiance, unspoken.

He thought in some half-formed, half-torn way that this should have happened long ago, when they were sixteen year olds, before they had found ways to fuck up their lives: this should have happened then and they should have found a way to make it last and be happy. If winning the wars had not depended so much on loss.

Severus’s hair fell between them, tangling in the kiss, which made Sirius laugh, briefly, as he pushed it out of the way, and there was an odd look in Severus’s eyes before Sirius kissed him again.

This, he thought, he would not lose.

***

Severus awoke around six in the morning, after an uneven dreamless sleep. He could not quite tell if Sirius were sleeping or not. Putting off the question of whether to wake him, wait for him, or simply leave, Severus rose as quietly as he could and picked up his clothes.

He washed and dressed in the bathroom. The Mark was a shadow under his skin, now, almost gone. After so many years of it being a part of him, the almost-absence looked strange to him. He hoped it would fade altogether; he hoped it would be soon.

It had been midnight or later when they had gone to bed together, and it was early now, but for the hours between Sirius had seemed to sleep soundly. If he was sleeping still Severus would not wake him; he hoped Sirius would understand; the prudent thing would be to write a note, but it seemed trite; he did not want to.

He rested his hands on the sink and glared at it. Sirius made it seem easy to forget everything else but this, yet it was not in his nature to forget; he had work to do and he must finish it.

 _Bastard_ , he thought, half ironic and half heartfelt.

He went back into the hallway and pulled on his coat and returned to the room where they had slept. Sirius, awake now, sitting now in the dishevelled bed, looking hollow-eyed and febrile with tiredness, and watching Severus as if he was the only thing that mattered. 

Since learning Sirius was an Animagus, Severus had become used to seeing something both human and animal in him: in the long flanks and limbs, the shape of his ribcage, the long black hair, the muscles under his skin.

He had always been beautiful. Even in the Shrieking Shack, skeletal and filthy, his hair brittle from starvation, he had been recognisable. 

Severus retrieved his bag from under the window in silence. He turned back to Sirius, wanting to say something, or rather, wanting a version of events where he did not have to speak, where simple transparency was something he was capable of.

Sirius reached out and brushed his fingertips against Severus’s coat, over his ribs; an odd, gentle gesture. “You’ll come back?” he said, quietly.

“This evening.” It still felt like taking a risk; he should take more time to think it through, wait for a week or more. But that caution held no appeal for him.

He let himself out of the flat, almost soundlessly. He closed the door and descended the turning staircase to the ground. The building was cool and quiet. He paused halfway to collect himself.

He had given up, he had thought, the desire to belong, or to be trusted, or to be liked. He had needed Dumbledore’s trust and he had needed Voldemort’s trust, and for these he had given up everyone else’s. He had not expected to find any of his experiences to be shared ones, let alone to find them shared with Sirius: his private battles, his anger, his sense of betrayal and misplaced loyalty.

Affection felt like a language he had lost the use of. Sirius, despite his long imprisonments, was easy and open in a way that Severus did not fully understand.

Sirius’s words, muttered into the juncture of his shoulder: _I wanted you, I always wanted you._

 _I wanted you_ , Severus had whispered, and later that night wondered if he would regret the words, wondered at himself for confessing it so readily. Sirius was no longer who he had been, Severus recognised that, but once he had been cruel; once they had hurt each other at every opportunity.

Now here he stood, at the bottom of the stairwell. He did not want to leave; he wanted to go back. He did not want to leave; he wanted to turn back up the stairs and return to the found, stolen room where Sirius was still, and touch him and be touched and forget everything, work and people they had known now dead. He wanted to be with Sirius in every place they had never seen.

In the past weeks, in Sirius’s company, it felt as if all his old secrets were falling open. Perhaps he should allow it, but still it left him exposed, excoriated. Sirius had a gift for it. Nothing in his life had prepared him for it.


End file.
